All posts by afoellmi@yahoo.com

The Future of Productivity: Teamwork and Collaboration

Long gone are the days when the bulk of office communication was made via lengthy, often incomprehensible email threads. Also going extinct—thankfully— are the colossal company-wide emails that were often responded to by recipients using the “reply all” button.

Today’s corporate communication is evolving—not to the Orwellian, drone-like future portrayed in the movies, but toward a more multimedia-focused and casual approach. Nowadays, boring project management software is losing traction to intuitive digital tools such as Slack or Microsoft Teams which enable communication and collaboration to happen from a single platform.

In this article, you’ll learn about the major trends that are transforming office communications around the world. You’ll also gain insight into how several industry leaders envision the future of collaboration, and what tools they’re using within their organizations to push forward projects worldwide.

Read More…

Customer story: Garner Foods


Although Garner Foods is based in South Carolina, they sell hot sauce and Green Mountain Gringo brand products all over the world. With digital tools, their projects are easily managed remotely, and team members can work from anywhere.

Garner Foods chose to partner with Microsoft 365 Business to easily onboard new employees and to secure company data stored on countless devices. With employees and sales representatives traveling all over the United States, being able to securely work and collaborate from any device has played a huge role in the company’s ongoing success.

Create a connected business powered by Microsoft

Imagine you’ve worked hard to plan and strategize your IoT roadmap. You’ve finally established what devices you want to connect and how you’re going to use that data to drive growth for your business. You’ve also convinced the board and other stakeholders about your strategy and have gotten the green light to begin ASAP. So you’re all set, right? Well, not exactly. What’s missing is one of the most challenging and crucial steps for most companies—one that can completely make or break your entire initiative: choosing the correct platform on which to execute your IoT program.

Ideally, you want a platform that allows devices to connect seamlessly —of course—but you also need flexibility, scalability, security, and the ability to transform data into dashboards to obtain insights.

In this infographic, you’ll learn how Microsoft IoT Central meets all of these requirements while delivering an intuitive and highly customizable UI that can and will adapt to your business, not the other way around.

View: Create a connected business powered by Microsoft

Create a connected business powered by Microsoft

Imagine you’ve worked hard to plan and strategize your IoT roadmap. You’ve finally established what devices you want to connect and how you’re going to use that data to drive growth for your business. You’ve also convinced the board and other stakeholders about your strategy and have gotten the green light to begin ASAP. So you’re all set, right? Well, not exactly. What’s missing is one of the most challenging and crucial steps for most companies—one that can completely make or break your entire initiative: choosing the correct platform on which to execute your IoT program.

Ideally, you want a platform that allows devices to connect seamlessly —of course—but you also need flexibility, scalability, security, and the ability to transform data into dashboards to obtain insights.

In this infographic, you’ll learn how Microsoft IoT Central meets all of these requirements while delivering an intuitive and highly customizable UI that can and will adapt to your business, not the other way around.

View: Create a connected business powered by Microsoft

Why governments trust Microsoft with their digital transformation

Public sector initiatives are more often than not highly complex and carefully planned endeavors. And, to be fair, they have every reason to be. Millions of people depend on public services to make their lives better, and even a brief interruption can affect thousands of citizens.

This doesn’t mean that governments should postpone or cancel their digital initiatives, however—they just have to avoid as much risk as humanly possible. A significant part of this involves making the right choice when partnering with a provider and choosing the correct platform. It’s critical, therefore, to pick one that guarantees flexibility, security, and cost-effectiveness, but more importantly, ensures the continuity of public services.

In this infographic, you’ll learn why Microsoft has become the partner of choice for governments across the world, and what characteristics have helped Microsoft’s products become a staple for public digital initiatives.

View: Why governments trust Microsoft with their digital transformation

The 7-step partner mini-guide to onboarding customers

Organizations don’t make the jump to digital collaborations overnight. It takes month—or even years, depending on their size—of careful planning and strategy to come up with a transition plan that doesn’t compromise operations while everybody gets onboarded.

It’s our job, then, to guide our clients and partners as to the best way they can make their digital plans happen. Of course, this isn’t always easy—some organizations have highly rigid and complex structures that can take a while to adapt and integrate new technologies, while others may have multiple stakeholders who need to be consulted during each stage of the process. Either way, a clear and well-established roadmap goes a long way toward ensuring the process goes as smoothly as possible.

That’s why we’ve created this infographic—to provide you with 7 time-tested steps that can make your customers’ Microsoft Teams adoption as seamless as possible. Use it as a handy cheat sheet for yourself or your sales teams, or bring it along to executive meetings for a visually impactful way of presenting a solid implementation strategy that’s recommended by Microsoft.

View: The 7-step partner mini-guide to onboarding customers

Reinvent Business Productivity with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Office 365

To get ahead of the competition, SMBs realize they need to break down silos, work from connected systems and make every customer engagement count. In this thought-provoking, easy-to-read eBook, discover how Business Central integrates with Office 365 to provide an all-in-one solution to drive success.

Using three, day-in-the-life scenarios, visualize how Business Central brings insight and efficiency to daily routines. Specifically, this eBook illustrates the life of a business owner, a sales rep and an accountant, and shows how Dynamics 365 transformed their jobs.

View: Reinvent Business Productivity with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Office 365

Leading the IoT: Gartner insights on how to lead in a connected world

The IoT is changing today’s organizations into digital businesses. It’s also creating innovative business models, boosting efficiency, and fostering engagement in both employees and customers. Change is not always smooth, however. Sometimes the only way to adapt and stay relevant is by radically reinventing the way things have been done in the past, which can be a painful process for some companies.

There are other barriers to entry for IoT as well: most enterprises don’t know where to start implementing the technology; moreover, if strategies do exist, there’s almost always a conflict regarding who owns them. During these discussions, it’s the job of the CIO to fill the resulting IoT leadership void.

This book provides CIOs and IT leaders with a solid foundation for starting business conversations, developing initiatives, and creating successful IoT strategies with a quick time-to-market. Subscribe now to download your copy.

View: Leading the IoT: Gartner insights on how to lead in a connected world

Enable digital, efficient, and trust-building services. Subscribe to learn more about Microsoft for Government.

Efficiency is especially important when other people’s lives depend on your services. Today’s governments now have the digital tools at their disposal to empower their citizens with intuitive, accessible applications that eliminate the need for paper, manual tasks, and long wait times.

Subscribe now to learn how your organization—public or private—can increase its ability to deliver fast, timely services that will improve end-user satisfaction and help you build trust with your target audience.

View: Enable digital, efficient, and trust-building services. Subscribe to learn more about Microsoft for Government.

A single digital workspace that connects ideas, projects, and people. Subscribe to learn more about Microsoft Teams.

As the world becomes increasingly connected, continuous product innovation in the Modern Workplace provides growing opportunities for today’s organizations to deliver customized business solutions to their customers.

In this digital landscape, the demand for unified solutions is stronger than ever, with 88 percent of Microsoft customers agreeing that having all their solutions together in one place saves them time. These same companies also estimate that they’ve saved nearly $5 million over three years from not having to switch back and forth between apps.

So how exactly are organizations adapting to these trends? Subscribe now to get the answer to this question and many others regarding Modern Workplace, digital collaboration, and Microsoft solutions.

View: A single digital workspace that connects ideas, projects, and people. Subscribe to learn more about Microsoft Teams.